


permanence

by ThanksForListening



Category: Six - Marlow/Moss
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, i tagged a lot of relationships but like, its kinda just all of them? kinda?, like its more of a group dynamic, or variations within the group, yeah u know what i mean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:20:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24598168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThanksForListening/pseuds/ThanksForListening
Summary: "It looked different on all of them. The nightmares. Thin walls and enough trauma to last multiple lifetimes meant that Cath had seen it all, from the dreamless to the sleepless nights and every shade in between. She was no Aragon, with her sturdy arms and unfailing strength, no Jane, offering the physical comfort that only a mother’s arms could provide, no Anne, cracking jokes until tears turned into laughter and smiles crept up like the sun on the horizon. She didn’t have Anna’s everlasting patience or Katherine’s gentle kindness, but she knew her role nonetheless: she was the observer. She watched, took notes, prepared for the worst and saw it come, and then waited for it to happen again. Because it always, always happened again."or, an excuse for me to write about the different ways the six queens deal with nightmares (told from Parr's POV)
Relationships: Anne Boleyn & Catherine Parr, Anne Boleyn & Katherine Howard, Anne of Cleves & Catherine Parr, Anne of Cleves & Katherine Howard, Catherine Of Aragon & Anne Boleyn, Catherine Parr & Jane Seymour, Catherine Parr & Katherine Howard, Catherine of Aragon & Catherine Parr
Comments: 6
Kudos: 108





	permanence

**Author's Note:**

> so i know literally 0 things about history so anything that was referenced in the musical that i wanted to write more about i literally just made up pls don't hate me if i messed something up lol. i just listened to it and got kinda really obsessed and needed to write something so here it is. not even sure i like this anymore but i finished it which means i have to put it on the internet forever. 
> 
> also idk if people have like, nicknames for them that everyone knows about but i just kinda decided on some when i needed them (Catherine Parr is Cath and everyone else is either their first or last name and i think thats it). 
> 
> also i didn't really write this with any ships in mind bc tbh idk if i ship any of them yet or which combos i do but you could probably read some of the pairings as romantic if u want so u know go ahead and do that im not gonna stop u lol.

It looked different on all of them. The nightmares. Thin walls and enough trauma to last multiple lifetimes meant that Cath had seen it all, from the dreamless to the sleepless nights and every shade in between. She was no Aragon, with her sturdy arms and unfailing strength, no Jane, offering the physical comfort that only a mother’s arms could provide, no Anne, cracking jokes until tears turned into laughter and smiles crept up like the sun on the horizon. She didn’t have Anna’s everlasting patience or Katherine’s gentle kindness, but she knew her role nonetheless: she was the observer. She watched, took notes, prepared for the worst and saw it come, and then waited for it to happen again. Because it always, always happened again. 

—

Aragon’s, like most of the others, started with a whimper. 

The noise was uncanny coming from her. The persona she’d crafted for the stage wasn’t far off from her own nature. Her strength made her seem untouchable; it was easy to forget the history behind her words, the human beneath her crown. 

She didn’t scream, not really. When it got bad, it was all in her body, in the way she fought her covers and lost her breath. They’d had to move everything off the top of her nightstand after the first time, when she’d shattered a lamp without waking up. If it lasted long enough, she spoke, the words only sometimes coherent, and they weren’t always the same but Cath has been keeping track of the most frequent phrases: _no, come back, don’t leave me, can’t breathe, help_. 

They only made sense after Aragon told them what she saw. Once she woke up, once someone broke through her mind’s blockades, once she stopped panting and wiped away the sweat and stray tears dripping down her face, she almost always talked to them. She spared few details in her storytelling. She spoke as if giving voice to the images in her head made them less real, as if it was only when they were said aloud that she could recognize their lack of power. 

Aragon never saw things as they were, not really; she dreamed in metaphors. She saw herself trapped in a box, drowning in the ocean, stranded in space. The scenarios were different, but in all of them, she watched as someone in the distance — a man she couldn’t see clearly enough to recognize — passed her by, left her to die alone. He was either too far away to hear her or didn’t care enough to turn back, and Aragon always said she didn’t know which it was, but Cath knew. She kept the secret to herself, let her believe in ignorance and innocence and kept her theories about the faceless man hidden in the pages of her notebook. 

With Aragon, every night was almost always the same. Jane went first, let her rest her head on her shoulder and helped her catch her breath. Then it was Anna, her voice cool but her eyes soft, giving the invitation to talk about it without ever letting pity into her words. They’d learned quickly that Aragon refused to be pitied, that the worst thing they could do was let sympathy creep into their eyes. The rest of them listened, and when enough time had passed, when the dream had both been materialized and vaporized, it was Anne, with her wit and her wicked smile, who said whatever she could to get a laugh or a groan out of the rest of them. Cath initially thought it was a little ironic that she was the one who signaled the change, but her ability to endearingly and harmlessly annoy, especially when it came to Aragon, made her invaluable. Their history didn’t matter — it had to be her. 

When they made their way back to their own rooms, the conversation never lasting long enough for anyone to stay up and get a start to their day, Cath lingered, watched the way Aragon took a deep breath and restabilized herself in the real world. Sometimes it took a few, but Cath knew to wait for the right exhale, the one that made her look like herself again. Only then did she close the door behind her.

—

Anne’s shouldn’t have caught her by surprise, yet Cath honestly didn’t expect to see her clawing at her neck the first time they barreled into her room. 

Maybe it was because she was usually so casual about her own beheading. She had her moments, and there was definitely a line that the rest of them couldn’t cross, but she talked about it as if it was nothing more than an annoyance. She constantly joked about it, both on and off stage. She talked about her death more than any of the others and with such indifference that it had taken Cath longer than it should have to understand that the humor was masking the fear, not replacing it. 

At her worst, Anne screamed as she woke up; the girls didn’t usually let it get that far, not anymore. More often than not, Aragon was the one who heard the cries that preceded it, who banged on the rest of the doors and beat the others to her bedside. The doors had become their unspoken ritual, born from the desperation of the first times, when the memories were fresh, their connection still forming, and the nightmares a mystery. No one had known what to expect, what to do, and it had been easier to deal with each one of them together. The tradition had never broken, not for the worst nights.

And for Anne, tradition started with Aragon. Always and without fail. Cath knew it was no coincidence. She’d taken note about a month and a half into their rebirth, when she’d realized that Aragon had rearranged her furniture so their beds shared a wall, so she’d hear the warning signs and step in before it was too late. She also knew why she’d done it, why it was so important to wake her up before the dream could. 

Anne saw the past as if she’d never left it. She’d told the story after one of the first times, and didn’t need to confirm anymore that every time after was exactly the same. She was brought to a tower, led through unfamiliar halls and sent down what felt like hundreds of stairs, went lower and lower until even the sun itself couldn’t find her. They threw her behind bars, and she didn’t know how long she waited for them to come back. Hunger and fear gnawed at her stomach, went to war to see who was stronger, and neither were ever tamed. 

She remembered feeling blinded by the light when they finally dragged her back outside, so much so that she didn’t see the set up until she was pushed onto her knees, forced to beg in front of the crowd that was eagerly awaiting her execution. Her voice shook when she told the girls about the boos, the jeers, the glee on their faces when Henry gave the final order. Cath had written down that it was this moment, more than any other, that made Anne hesitate the most in her retelling: the realization that so many strangers truly wanted her dead, and that she could never do anything to change their minds. Cath wondered if maybe that’s what she was really afraid of: not dying, but being utterly and completely powerless.

If none of them got to her in time, she saw it all the way through the end. She was led to the block, had her head forcibly guided to its mark, and as she’d told the story she’d started crying again, although technically, Cath noted, she’d never truly stopped. She described looking out into the crowd, knowing their spiteful faces would be the last thing she’d see. She said she remembered trying to look up, to find the sun, to let it steal her sight one more time, but before she could she heard the blade cut through the air above her, and then...

Her shouts always fell in time with her own decapitation, her eyes shooting open as fire shot through every nerve in her body. She’d told them that she hadn’t felt the cut, not really, but her mind filled in the blanks, and she could barely find the words to describe the sensation. Only Katherine nodded in understanding when she tried. 

If Aragon woke her up, if they got to her early enough, she could shake the memories off almost entirely on her own. If they didn’t, if she saw too much of her own life, her own death, she needed to be held, needed the weight of someone’s embrace to anchor her back to the present. Anne wasn’t picky — she’d fall into whoever’s arms opened up first — but Cath knew it was Aragon’s who gave her the most comfort; anyone else taking over that job was a rare exception. It was easy for Cath to forget that Aragon had also been a mother, although when she held her, when Anne squeezed her back and buried her face in her shoulder, it was painfully obvious that those arms were strong enough to carry a whole life. 

The rest of them usually piled onto the bed next to her. Anne often disregarded the concept of personal space, and Cath would be the first to admit that the constant energy and attention could get tiresome on a normal day, but on these nights everyone indulged her. It wasn’t about them or what they wanted: it was about Anne. And if she needed to feel her friends around her, then that’s exactly what she’d get.

Like Aragon, it usually didn’t take too long before Anne could breathe again, before the tears dried up and her body stopped shaking. On the really bad nights, Katherine didn’t leave with the rest of them. Cath didn’t know what they did, if they talked about anything or just sat with the knowledge that for both of them, death sounded exactly the same. Either way, they both slept well into the afternoon, and whenever they could, the other girls let them.

— 

Jane was the last person she started taking notes for. With the others, the nightmares came quickly. At the start, each dream seemed to be the worst kind, and they were nearly impossible to hide. But after their first month or so together, when Cath had notes and tallies for everyone in the house, her pages reserved for Jane were completely blank. Naively, or perhaps selfishly, she’d led herself to believe that the logical conclusion was that Jane simply didn’t have nightmares. That her death had been tragic but perhaps her life hadn’t, hadn’t been great but had been good enough to avoid the fate of the rest of them.

She found out the hard way that she’d been sorely mistaken. 

It wasn’t that Jane didn’t have nightmares — it was that when she did, she stayed completely silent. They’d only discovered it by accident, and for all her claims of being the observer in the group, it wasn’t even Cath who noticed. It was Katherine, on a sunny afternoon, looking up at where Jane had dozed off on the couch and pointing out the tears streaming down her cheeks. 

The others had circled around her almost instantly. They all stared at her, each person at a loss for words, and Cath didn’t know if it spoke to their character or to Jane’s that not a single person knew what to do, how to help the helper. 

It was Cath who finally reached over, gently shook her until her eyes snapped open and she gasped, and even something as simple and reactionary as that was done in near silence. Cath didn’t want to think about what had made her learn that skill. 

That first time she’d refused to talk about it. None of them pushed too hard, but they’d all made assumptions about what had led to the tears. Instead, they sat around the couch, started conversations about nothing just to fill the silence. Katherine had sat down next to her, and Cath watched as Jane began to gently braid her hair, wondered who got more comfort out of the simple movement. The other three carried the brunt of the conversation. Cath almost felt guilty about her lack of contribution, but the others had quickly perfected the art of the meaningless debate, and it was easier to just let them go at it than to try and add anything. Plus, watching gave her the head space to make mental notes that she’d later write down: for Jane, it seemed as if she needed to be distracted, to let her mind wander but not too far, to feel surrounded by others but not the center of attention. 

When night finally came, when the others had gone to their own rooms, Cath hung back. She asked her, softly, how often it happened. Her nonanswer spoke loud enough. She told her that when it happened again (not if, _when_ , always _when_ ), she should wake someone, give some sort of sign so they could be there for her, in whatever way she needed them, and she’d expected pushback but Jane had simply nodded.

They decided on a song, a lullaby, one that would only be played on the nights when it was bad, when she needed someone to remind her that she wasn’t alone anymore. Part of Cath wondered if she’d chosen the song with the hopes that it would go unnoticed, that it would keep the rest of them asleep instead of bringing them to her room. But if they’d learned anything from their shared experience, it was how to sleep lightly. So when the song played, they came. And it was weeks later, on one of the lullaby nights, that she told them what she saw. 

She always started in the same place. Opening her eyes to find herself in a maze, huge green hedged walls towering around her. She couldn’t climb over them, couldn’t walk through them, could only go where the path cleared for her. 

She heard the baby first. Some things changed— the maze didn’t always look or move the same— but not this. Coming from somewhere in front of her was the cries of a newborn, the sound she’d heard just briefly once before. She started moving forward, going through the twists and turns as fast as she could, but the sound never got any louder, the child never any closer. Still, she didn’t stop, not until she heard him behind her. 

When Henry called out to her, he didn’t sound angry. Not at first. She’d seen his temper in action, had known his fuse was short, but it had never been directed toward her, not the way it had with the others. And when he said her name, when he told her he loved her, she believed him. For a moment the crying disappeared, and all she heard was him, beckoning her back home. She refused to look at anyone when she described that part; Cath didn’t need to take notes to figure out why.

When she turned around, when she started to step toward him, he got quieter. He called out to her less and less, and the sweetness of his voice soured with every inch she erased between them. She didn’t understand why until she heard the crying again. The farther away she walked from the baby, the louder it got, the more distressed it sounded, but when she turned around, when she walked toward it, Henry‘s voice grew. The farther away from him she got, the more he demanded she come back home, and the crying only got louder, and she told them that even in the dream she knew it was a trap, but she didn’t know how to get out. 

It was usually then, while she stood in the middle, trapped in a crossroad with two wrong directions, that the walls began to change. The green hedges solidified, turned to stone around her. The walls grew higher, wider, and her path got thinner, her turns disappearing. She told them how she ran, not toward Henry or the child but simply in whatever direction she could, but it was useless. She couldn’t save them, and she couldn’t save herself. And it was only then, when she gave in to her fate, when she stopped running, that she woke up. 

If she were a braver person, Cath knew she would have apologized to Jane as soon as she heard her story, because she had secretly envied her time with Henry. She’d thought about how lucky the other woman had been, to die before he could tire of her. She’d thought that her death, so natural in its cause, meant that she hadn’t suffered. That if she hadn’t seen the worst in him, she must not have seen any bad at all. She knew she should be the one to say it, too, with her own survival often feeling like proof that she hadn’t suffered anything near the fate of the others. She knew she should say that she understood now, that he may have thought he loved her but true love didn’t rely on contingencies, and spending everyday waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop wasn’t peace, but she didn’t. She put all her words, all her thoughts and feelings, onto the page, where she could control it. Where it would be safe. And she made sure to always keep her door open a crack at night, in case she needed to hear the familiar melody. 

—

Like Jane, Anna wasn’t woken up by the others. Cath didn’t know what she looked like when she dreamt, how she reacted immediately after. She had a suspicion that her silence and Jane’s didn’t come from the same place. Jane’s seemed to be borne out of necessity and survival, and Anna’s...Anna’s was different. Cath didn’t understand it exactly, had notes and theories but no real answers as to why she woke up quietly. All she knew was that it wasn’t screams or cries that let them know she’d suffered at the hands of her own subconscious — it was the sound of the tv, volume just loud enough to echo across the house. 

It had been Cath who put it together the first time. They’d woken up to the sound of old commercials for products no one truly needed, had stared at each other in confusion as they made their way down the stairs to find Anna on the couch, eyes glued to the tv and glassy with dissociation. Cath could see the question in everyone’s mind, the one they’d never give a voice to: what could she, with her palace and throne, have possibly seen that would wake her up like this, keep her up all night? 

The rest of them just sat down next to her and watched for a few minutes, no one quite knowing what to do, and it was Cath who realized what was missing, Cath who had to take on Anna’s role. She asked her if she wanted to talk about it, and she had to repeat herself four times before she got any sort of response. Even then, it was just a quick shake of the head. 

Every time it happened, they found her in the same spot, in the same state. They each had their place: Katherine and Cath on the couch with her, the others on the ground in front of them. They watched whatever was on, and Cath didn’t know if it was intentional that the channel Anna turned to was usually the infomercial one, the one that only came on when no one was supposed to be watching and offered nothing in the form of entertainment. It didn’t matter. Nobody changed it and nobody spoke, not until the sun came up. 

The first time, everyone stayed up all night. They’d all been on edge, not knowing what to expect, but Anna hadn’t moved. When Jane finally went to make breakfast, it was like a switch went off, and suddenly the Anna they knew and loved was back, acting as if nothing had happened. 

Sometimes Anna fell back asleep, but not always. Same with the others. They all had nights where they dozed off, head bent in a way that was sure to leave them stiff in the morning. The only constant was Katherine, who almost always fell asleep with her head against Anna’s side. It was another reason Anna’s stood out from the rest: no one ever went back to their room once she turned on the TV, but they also didn’t stay awake all night, either. 

Cath didn’t hear about the dreams for a while, not until it was only her and Anna who were still awake. Anna didn’t move, wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t take her eyes off the screen. Cath hadn’t asked, even though she’d wanted to: Anna just started talking, her voice barely over a whisper. 

She told her that when she closed her eyes, she woke up back in the palace. _Her_ palace. It was exactly as she remembered. The only thing that had changed was her. She looked the same, was in the same place, but she remembered everything about now, about their resurrection. She knew the past, present, future, the truths behind names she’d only heard in passing. She knew the horrors that Henry had put others through, and she knew that behind these walls, she was safe. 

Except she didn’t feel safe. Not anymore. She’d spent years alone and had loved it, had lived a life so many would kill for, but all she noticed now was how quiet it was. She looked around at her own belongings and all she saw were relics of a time no one wanted to go back to, least of all her. She looked at her home and felt nothing.

Anna hadn’t taken her eyes off the TV as she’d spoken, but Cath saw how she started slowly rubbing Katherine’s arm. Anna told her that in her dreams, she knew what was happening, who was next, but every time she tried to leave the doors wouldn’t open. Cath knew, then, that no matter what kind of freedom Anna might have had back then, it still wasn’t agency. It wasn’t enough. She wondered if the doors in her dream were a blessing, if they prevented her from trying to stop something she couldn’t, from witnessing something she couldn’t unsee. 

When she watched the others, when they told the group about their nights, Cath usually didn’t ask too many questions. She knew her nature, knew she had a habit of always wanting to learn more, and she’d discovered quickly that most people preferred to know less. But she hadn’t talked to anyone like this, where it was just them, separate from the rest, and for some reason that made it harder to stop herself. She had to know: why the TV? What purpose did it serve? How did it help? 

For minutes, Anna didn’t answer. Cath usually considered herself to be a patient woman, but this silence was agony. Part of her longed to take them back but she knew it was too late, knew that even like this Anna wouldn’t take the cop out, was too stubborn and proud to let it go. It was a trait that Cath usually admired about her; now, she wondered if it would have been easier on both of them if she’d just dismiss her and her questions, tell her to keep her mouth shut. 

But she didn’t ignore it, didn’t tell Cath to fuck off. She answered. She told her that when she’d first woken up, she wasn’t convinced that she was back, even as she stared at her phone and her room and their house. Her mind could have made up lamps or cell phones or even her living with the other wives, but not the TV. Not the weird shit she found people tried to sell in the middle of the night, things like covers for your deck or pans that won’t break if you slam them across the countertop. It was so absurd, so ridiculously modern. Her subconscious wasn’t that creative. And there was something almost calming, she told her, about the way they spoke. It was like their useless chatter could fill every empty space in her mind and leave no room for images she didn’t want to see anymore.

When she finished talking, neither of them moved, not until Katherine shifted next to her. Both of them held their breaths until she stopped. Cath stared at her, and there were so many words resting on the tip of her tongue that she didn’t know how they didn’t all come spilling out at once. She wanted to tell her that it wasn’t her fault. That she couldn’t have stopped it. That even if she’d never pissed him off, even if she’d lasted longer, he would have tired of her no matter what she did. And at that point in time, Cath didn’t think there was a person alive who could have saved Katherine from the men who would play with her life like it was something they owned and then throw it away as if it was never worth anything at all. 

But she didn’t. She didn’t say anything. They both just sat there, turning their eyes back toward the screen, trying desperately to think about nothing at all.

—

As time passed, as they began to differentiate between the bad and the worst, Cath watched, listened, and learned. She discovered that Jane didn’t need all of them in her room every time. For Anne, if they got to her before the blade did, sometimes Aragon and Katherine were enough. Aragon often sought out who she needed if she woke up silently, and it wasn’t uncommon to find her walking out of someone else’s room in the morning instead of her own. 

But Katherine wasn’t like the rest of them.

She still didn’t know why Anna had come to her the first time. She’d woken up to banging on her door, the sound loud and heavy and desperate. By the time she opened her eyes, she was standing over her, and Cath had to swallow back the string of swear words she almost let out when she saw the sheer panic on her face. _It’s Katherine,_ she’d told her, _I can’t wake her up_. They ran — Anna, back to Katherine’s room, and Cath to wake the others. Later, when she started her notes, she’d questioned what it said about their newly forming group that everyone had woken up instantly, even when the only explanation she’d given them was Katherine’s name. She couldn’t quite decide if it was a testament of their care for one another or of their collective trauma. She found that she didn’t really want to know.

The panic was palpable, not just in Katherine but in the rest of them as well. Cath didn’t know what about this, what about her, made them all so on edge, made her feel like she wanted to close her eyes and run away, become the coward she knew herself to be. Maybe it was the way Katherine thrashed against her covers, each movement a textbook image of desperation. Maybe it was the tears that were streaming down her cheeks, not gentle like Jane’s but fast and uncontrollable like Anne’s. Or maybe it was the way they could all see the terror on her face, obvious even with her eyes squeezed shut. 

Cath had felt as if she was frozen in a moment she didn’t want to see, forced to bare witness to everyone’s pain, and she knew that came with the job, knew that she signed up for it the minute she’d started keeping notes on the others, but now...she didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to see it. She didn’t want to know what she knew anymore.

But the world had never cared about what she wanted, had it?

Anne snapped first. _Why haven’t you woken her up?_ She’d yelled, nearly running up to the bed. Anna tried to stop her but Anne was stronger than she looked, shoved her away and tried to put a hand on Katherine’s shoulder and—

Cath had pages and pages of notes dedicated to that scream. She could hear it, clear as day, long after that first night. It sucked the air right out of the room, froze each of them in their place except Anne, who drew her hand to her chest, held it there as if she didn’t trust it not to stray back to her. They stood there and watched, almost as if they didn’t believe it. As if they didn’t want to believe it. That this was their Katherine, who always had a smile on her face, who bought shit no one needed just because it came in a pack of six. Their Katherine, who shrieked as if Anne’s touch had set her on fire, who kept her eyes shut even as the cries turned into _no, don’t, stop, please_. Sadness, anger, reservation, fear, everything Cath saw on the rest of their faces she saw on Katherine’s, and she didn’t know how one person could hold that many emotions inside of them, could feel them all at once.

Jane broke their silence, tried calling out to her, her voice soft and soothing, her words an attempt to coax her out of whatever reality her mind had her trapped in. Nothing happened. Anna joined in, and Cath could hear the desperation creeping into her voice, her usual steady nature quickly disappearing. She wanted to help but she didn’t know how, so she watched, watched as nothing changed, nothing got better, not until Aragon yelled her name as if it were a command and Katherine bolted upright. 

Her eyes were open but Cath knew instantly that she didn’t see them. Anne reached for her again, slowly this time, but the minute she got close enough to touch, Katherine practically jumped back. There weren’t many things that Cath hated more than that image: Katherine, trembling in the corner, knees brought up to her chest, sobbing, the sound not nearly muffled enough to hide it.

The first few times, she cried so hard she puked. Cath was almost grateful for the moments when she’d lunge for the trash can, because it was only then that she’d let any of them touch her. Jane usually walked out when it started, and she always came back with a glass of water but they all knew it wasn’t the reason she left. It was Aragon and Anna who sat with her, who rubbed circles on her back and held her hair out of the way. The first time, once it was over, once the crying had slowed and her breathing had steadied, she’d fallen asleep slumped against Anna’s body. It was another potential positive to the overwhelmingly negative situation: the puking usually meant she’d sleep again that night, exhaustion outweighing whatever it was she’d seen. 

When one of the others fell back asleep after a night like that, it usually cued the rest of them to sleep too, to go back to their rooms and attempt to salvage a few more hours themselves; with Katherine, nobody seemed ready to leave. For a while, none of them moved, none of them spoke. They just sat there. Waiting. The fear was palatable, but Cath wasn’t sure what they were more afraid of: waking Katherine up on accident, or having to do it again on purpose.

It was Anne, with tears in her eyes, who stormed out of the room first. From her spot by the door, Cath watched as Aragon followed her out, and as time passed they would eventually come to understand one another but that first night, so early into their group, there was still a tension there, one that would only fade with time and conversation. Cath held her breath when Anne lunged at Aragon, but she just let the hits come. One after the other, Anne’s fists banged against her chest, each one less forceful than the one that came before it. When Aragon finally stopped it, caught Anne’s wrists in midair, Cath watched as Anne seemed to crumble against her, and she couldn’t hear them but she could see Anne’s shoulders shaking with cries of her own. 

It was hard to say the nights got better. The puking stopped, but the crying didn’t, and as long as there were tears in her eyes Katherine refused to let the others touch her. Those nights somehow seemed longer than the first ones. When they woke her, when she backed herself into the corner of her room, the rest of them were left with almost nothing to do, almost no way to help. They’d sit on the floor and wait for her to come back to them, wait for the sobs to subside and whatever images she saw to fade long enough for reality to set in. It was only then that she moved toward them, slid onto the ground and let Anne and Anna put their arms around her. 

She remembered it was her idea. That while they waited, when they tried to ground her in the present without ever laying a hand on her, they should use their voices, the same way Aragon used hers to wake her up. So they sang. Sometimes together, sometimes separate. Old songs, new songs, original songs, it didn’t matter so long as they filled the silence and did so softly. Cath wasn’t sure if it worked, if it helped or not, but Katherine never told them to stop. So they sang. 

Cath had more notes on Katherine than any of the other girls, partially because she was the only one who refused to tell them what she saw. Cath wasn’t upset — it was her dreams, her decision on whether she wanted to talk about them — but she couldn’t help herself from theorizing in the privacy of her own notes. It hurt more than she thought it would. Thinking about her dreams, trying to imagine what she saw at night, coming up with horrible, gut-wrenching, terrifying scenarios on each page. Every time she wrote about her she felt sick to her stomach, but it was better to come up with ideas, to convince herself that one of her theories had to be right, because if she was wrong, if what Katherine saw was worse than anything Cath’s imagination could conjure up...she couldn’t be wrong. And as much as it hurt her to think about what exactly led to that type of reaction, to imagine for herself what she’d gone through, what she may have relived on the worst nights, she wouldn’t let herself leave it alone. If she understood, if she could figure it out, solve the puzzle, maybe she could find another way to help. To make it better. And any level of pain was worth it for that.

—

The very first person Cath started taking notes on was herself. She had to. Words lived on a page in a way that they didn’t anywhere else, and on the nights when she woke up in a sweat, when she felt tears in her eyes and on her cheeks, she needed the permanence that came with penmanship. She needed something to rely on. 

The first time, she’d been so caught up in her notes that she hadn’t noticed the girls walk in. She didn’t know how long they’d watched her, how long they waited for her to finish only for the words to continue. All she knew was that it was Katherine’s hand gently covering her own that stopped her pen mid-sentence, brought her gaze up and made her aware of both the noise she must have been making and the audience she suddenly had. 

She didn’t let them see her notes. Not the first time and certainly not any time after, when they each had their own pages filled with everything Cath would never tell them. She slid her notebook under her pillow, then under her mattress, let them believe she only wrote about herself and kept it hidden in plain sight. Those words were off-limits. 

The third time they asked, she told them the bare minimum. None of her theories, none of her rants and ramblings, but simply what she saw on the nights she woke up in a panic. 

She always started with his face. She hated looking at it, hated it then and hated it even more now, with her knowledge of what horrors came before her. She hated the way she censored herself when she was with him, the thoughts she buried and the feelings she suppressed in order to gain her title of Survivor. She hated the role she was expected to play as his Queen, the one that would never be her, not truly, not genuinely. She hated everything about him, except the words coming out of his mouth. 

In her dreams, he set her free. 

He told her he had tired of her, that he no longer found her interesting, and they were words that would have stung had they come from anyone else, but not from him. Not when they didn’t come as a death sentence but rather as a door opening for her, literally and figuratively. From his lips, those words were poetry, beautiful and elegant, a work of art in its own right. 

The minute she found herself outside, she went back home. Back to him. To Thomas. The trip was quicker than it should have been, something she noticed every time but never cared to focus on, not when he was finally within reach. She hadn’t dared waste time with a letter, not when she could knock on the door just as quickly as any messenger. Riding down familiar paths, the sun shining bright above her, she began to imagine their reunion, to give breath to the life inside her head that she’d tried to bury during her time in the castle. 

She didn’t expect to find him with another woman. When she opened the door, when a stranger stared back at her, she felt her confidence sway just slightly, but she built herself back up, reminded herself of where she’d been just moments before. She knew more than anyone the power that marriage held, and if he’d used that same power while she was gone, she knew that she wouldn’t, _couldn’t_ , blame him. Not when he could break it now, not when they could have that with each other, the way they’d planned. She knew their love. It was stronger than this.

The first real sign she got, the first feeling that something was off, came as she saw his face when he stepped into view. Cath had always prided herself on her ability to read other people, to get a sense of their emotions before they even spoke a word. It was how she’d survived Henry, how she’d known what to say and when to make sure he never found her reprehensible. But now, staring at his face, she saw emotions that didn’t make any sense. Confusion, annoyance, disgust, all swirled into one, blinking like warning signs on an empty road, flashing like lightning on a clear day. He said her name but it sounded all wrong, nothing like she remembered. 

Still, she ignored them. The signs. She explained her release, confessed to him that the life in her head, the life they’d planned together, the future she’d once thought impossible, was all that had kept her going for years. She told him they could be together now, that it could finally become reality, and she reached for his hands but he pulled away. He looked down at her, and she hadn’t noticed it before but he towered over her, and staring up at him she couldn’t remember ever feeling this small.

When he opened his mouth, none of the words that came out made any sense. He told her that he’d never meant what he said, that they’d never planned a life together. He told her she was crazy if she believed their fling was anything more than a temporary distraction, that she was someone he would ever consider marrying. She tried to correct him, to bring up the conversations they had and their moments together but he told her she misremembered, that her mind must have cracked under the pressure of the royal life because nothing she said even remotely resembled reality. 

She wanted to fight. She wanted to yell and scream, to tell him that she knew her mind, that there was none stronger than hers, none more reliable, but before she could say a word he asked if she’d created any other fantasies. If she had any other memories that could never have happened. If when she closed her eyes, she saw more lives for herself, saw herself with anyone else but him, and suddenly she couldn’t speak, because when she closed her eyes she saw herself on stage. She saw herself surrounded by women who had come before her, with a new face and new hair and _pants_ , and she knew it could never be true, but she remembered it. She remembered it so clearly, could hear the melodies in her head and see the faces of women she’d never met, could identify them even when they had bodies that didn’t match the portraits she’d seen, when they should have been strangers. And she remembered the feeling of standing underneath the lights, of singing and having people listen, of finally feeling heard, and it was magnificent and exhilarating but it couldn’t possibly be real.

She kept her mouth shut but he knew, somehow, what her silence meant, gave her a smile that couldn’t be trusted and told her perhaps it would be best to go back to the king, to beg for his forgiveness, and the last thought she remembered having before her eyes shot open was that she’d rather die. 

She hadn’t known what to expect from them. Part of her held her breath as she finished talking, waited for them to tell her that she was overreacting, that she didn’t suffer like the rest of them, that she didn’t suffer at all. But they never did. She felt Jane’s arms around her, felt Anne reach for her hand, listened to Anna say the only crazy thing about her was the fact that she ate kale on purpose, and within minutes they were all debating whether the health benefits were worth the lack of taste, and it was so absurdly normal, so uniquely them, that it relaxed her, grounded her, and without meaning to she closed her eyes and let the sound of them put her back to sleep. 

She only told them about it once, but the pattern stayed the same every time, the conversation and the company never faltering or failing to ease her mind. It was after she woke up again, when everybody had gone back to their own rooms, that she wrote. Each entry was almost exactly the same, but she never felt as if she truly got rid of the lingering feeling until she wrote it down, until she could look back at it and know that even if her mind betrayed her one day, if her memory disappeared, she could always rely on the notes to remember the truth. Once she wrote it down, it couldn’t be changed, not without leaving traces, evidence of altered work. Her writing could never lie to her. It was the one thing in life she could trust wholeheartedly.

—

The dreams scared her, shook her to her bones in a way she often struggled to describe, but they were nothing compared to the feeling she got when she woke up one morning, reached for her notebook and found empty space. She’d barely opened her eyes but suddenly she was wide awake, was searching deeper and deeper under her mattress, was about to stand up and tear her room apart if she had to when she saw her. Sitting on the edge of her bed was Anne, staring not at Cath but at the notebook in her lap. 

“ _Give that back_ ”. Cath didn’t expect the intensity of her own voice. She hadn’t talked like that, hadn’t given orders like that, since she was the Queen. She could see Anne falter slightly, but she still didn’t look up, and it was only then that Cath noticed the book was still closed. 

“It’s not just you,” Anne said softly. “You’ve written about all of us in here, haven’t you?”

Cath hesitated, long enough for Anne to finally look up at her, and she didn’t know what she thought she’d find in her eyes but she certainly wasn’t expecting sorrow. Or fear. She thought she’d find anger, but not like this, not so subdued. 

For half a second she thought about lying; instead, she nodded. Anne looked back down, as if she could see right through the cover, as if she could stare straight into all the pages herself without ever lifting a finger. “I haven’t read it,” she said, “so you don’t have to worry about that. But I think you should show it to someone. Someone smart. Let them help you, and maybe help the rest of us.” She looked back up at her. “That is what you’re doing, right? Trying to figure us all out so you can make it better. Studying the dreams to make them stop.”

Out of all of her questions, she only cared about one: “How did you know?”

“I pay attention when I want to. It’s easy when no one expects you to do it. Easy to watch people when they’re usually the ones doing the watching.”

“What do you see when you watch me?”

Anne shrugged. “I see the way wheels are always spinning in your mind when one of us starts talking. I see how you’re always the last one to leave, how you always linger just a second longer than the rest of us. I see how quiet you get, even when I know you always have a thousand questions about everything. You never ask them. You never push.”

“It’s not my job,” she said without meaning to.

Anne frowned at her. “Not your job?”

Cath sighed, searched for the words she’d never planned to say. “We each have our thing on the bad nights. Our role. Yours is to cheer people up. Anna’s is to start the conversation. And mine is to watch. To watch and to learn.”

Anne just sat there for a moment, staring at her. Usually, when she looked at Anne, she thought she looked young. Maybe it was her smile, or the mischief that was almost always in her eyes, but right now, without either, she looked older than her years. As if she carried more wisdom behind her eyes than she should, than most would ever expect. 

Finally, she spoke. “I think you’re wrong.”

“About what?”

“You. Your job.” Cath must have looked as confused as she felt, because Anne elaborated. “You’re not the person who watches us. Well, you are, but watching isn’t your role.”

“Then what is?”

“You’re what holds us all together. You’re the glue, Cath.”

Cath shook her head. “No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. The writing, the watching, it’s how you do it. How you know what everyone needs.”

“No, you don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand?”

Cath didn’t know what kind of dam inside her snapped, but suddenly she couldn’t stop the words from flowing. “Because I know what everyone needs, and what they don’t need is me. My job is useless if I’m not smart enough to fix it. I haven’t found a single solution in these pages, but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how to help. I don’t—“ she searched for the words. “I don’t know how to be there for you guys. How to show that I care. Not unless I can solve it. Which I can’t.”

Anne held the notebook up. “And what do you think this is? Proof of how much you don’t care?”

Cath shook her head. “Those notes are stupid.”

“Says who?”

“Says the person who wrote them.”

“That hardly makes you qualified to judge.”

Cath laughed, but it didn’t come out right. “You don’t even know what’s inside.”

“But I know you. If you wrote them, they aren’t stupid.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve spent months writing them, but Katherine still wakes up screaming. Jane still wakes up crying. And you…” she shook her head. “There aren’t any answers in there. No one wants those.”

“I do. I want them.”

“Why?” 

Anne’s eyes shifted back down to the notebook; when she looked back up, she held it out to her. “Because I want to get better. And I want my friends to get better. And to do that, I think we need to understand. I think we need to learn. And who better to teach us than the one who watches and learns? Who better to bring us together than the glue?”

Cath stared at the journal. She hadn’t meant to say it all, to give a voice to the thoughts she’d tried to bury. She’d planned on hiding her uselessness until she could fight it, until she could find something usable, something that worked. But maybe that wasn’t her job. Maybe she needed someone else to find what she couldn’t, to connect the dots she laid out, to see a map in her pages and read it in a way she never could. Or maybe, if they read what she wrote, they’d discover the same thing she did: that it was helpless. That she was helpless. That it didn’t matter. Two theories, two potential ends, and no way of predicting which would come into fruition. 

She spoke more to the journal than to Anne. “I don’t think you’ll find what you’re looking for in there.”

“Maybe not. But it can’t get any worse than it already is.”

Cath nodded, reached for the book only to push it back into Anne’s hands. “I want you to read it first.”

Anne looked up at her. “Why?”

“Because you told me to find someone smart to help me.” 

Anne smiled, before staring back at the notebook. She went to open it but hesitated, and it was Cath who reached for her hand, Cath who opened to the first page and let their work begin.

**Author's Note:**

> idk if im gonna write more for six bc i kinda have ideas but they're not fleshed out so if u want me to write more about them send me prompts i wont respond in the comments bc im crazy but if u send them to me on tumblr (@thanks--for--listening) ill probably definitely respond. 
> 
> also kudos and comments give me actual life ok thank u goodbye


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